AuthorTopic: Making vectorlinux run from ram? (Read 4136 times)

I had a chance to try out alot of distributions recently, most interesting was puppy linux...

Puppy is like vector in that in runs great on older hardware. I'm pretty sure it runs all in ram, and I have to say it really really flies on most computers I tried it on. Does anyone know if you can make vector run all in ram like puppy linux and all its variations do?

Just curious if this can be done for vectorlinux, and if so, how?

Puppy seems nice but its a nightmare getting any new programs to run on it, they have very little in their "pup" depository.

I guess its always good to check out whats on the other side of the fence, but sometimes, you'd like to bring something back with you.The speed and responsiveness of puppy, I'd like to see what I can do to borrow that for my vectorbox.

If you boot from the 6.0 light live cd, once you get to the screen where you can select which video mode and stuff you want to boot with, hit tab and you can edit the boot command. Add the command toram to the end of the line of commands. Hit enter and it will finish booting. Note: You should have about 1GB or more of ram to do this. (though you could probably get away with using a little less). HTH

Maybe. Run vliloconf as root in a terminal. Near the end of the wizard it will ask if you want to "pass certain parameters to the kernel at boot time" or something like that. You can enter the "toram" (no quotes) command there. The "toram" command definitely works for live versions but I'm not sure about regular hard drive installations. I guess it's worth a try though.

The "toram" option is for the live version. You could do what is referred to as a "poor man's install", where you copy the contents of the LiveCD to your hard drive, then configure your boot loader to load it from there. This method is more aimed making a bootable USB stick to use in lieu of a CD. Any changes to the system would disappear on next boot, which of course is not suited for normal use. I believe it is possible to use a "changes=.." option to save any changes to a storage device, and run a hybrid file system with some in RAM and some on a disk. However, I have not heard of anyone doing this with VL Live, so you'd probably be a pioneer on that front.

I had a chance to try out alot of distributions recently, most interesting was puppy linux...

Puppy is like vector in that in runs great on older hardware. I'm pretty sure it runs all in ram, and I have to say it really really flies on most computers I tried it on. Does anyone know if you can make vector run all in ram like puppy linux and all its variations do?

Just curious if this can be done for vectorlinux, and if so, how?

Puppy seems nice but its a nightmare getting any new programs to run on it, they have very little in their "pup" depository.

I guess its always good to check out whats on the other side of the fence, but sometimes, you'd like to bring something back with you.The speed and responsiveness of puppy, I'd like to see what I can do to borrow that for my vectorbox.

Steven

I'm a Puppy user too. I agree, it's more difficult to get new software to run with it and that's the main reason I still use Vector as well. Vector's also a bit more stable (especially in XOrg) though Puppy's definitely getting there since its 4.20 release.

What you can do, though, is download a file called dev_x.sfs which gives you all the same compilation and development tools in Puppy that Vector lets you take for granted.

I think these are the latest ones here, probably devx_421.sfs is the one you need;

Puppy is a very different animal than a "standard" system. Upon boot, it loads the image into memory and runs in Live mode. To save changes and settings, it writes them to non-volatile storage. These changes are then read next time it boots, after the Live image is loaded.

Loading 100MB into RAM is one thing, doing it with gigabytes is another. I guess you could make a tiny install, have it create a huge ram disk, then populate it with the file system, chroot into it and load new system from there. The boot would take a long time but operational speed should be impressive.

I guess its not really worth it for vector. I just liked the speed and responsiveness of puppy.

One thing I will say about puppy is its very very fast and responsive. As far as actually using it absolutely forget it.Their package management is the worst I have ever seen in any of the perhaps 50 linux distros I have used or tried.Unless everything you need comes with the puppy cd or derivative your using... Forget it.

Dependancy hell basically, with packages splattered acrross free hosting services and all these strange places, no centralorganized way. Then, you have to be using the exact version package or forget it and its a mess even finding the right files.Its kind of a mess and I'm done playing with even trying to install apps, I gave up and went running back to my lovely vector box where everything works beautifully, but not quite as fast or responsive as puppy.

I was trying puppy on an ancient computer that did not work so well with vector, but I think I will try again with light.I just figured perhaps I could learn something from that awful experience that could benefit my main vectorbox

I boot Vector 6.0 Light Live into my Sony PCG-TR2AP (no HD, 1gb RAM) using the 'toram' and 'changes=slaxchanges' boot prompts. Changes are saved to a USB stick. Additional programs can be added via gslapt (it appears that they are saved to the USB stick, too).

I guess its not really worth it for vector. I just liked the speed and responsiveness of puppy.

One thing I will say about puppy is its very very fast and responsive. As far as actually using it absolutely forget it.Their package management is the worst I have ever seen in any of the perhaps 50 linux distros I have used or tried.Unless everything you need comes with the puppy cd or derivative your using... Forget it.

Dependancy hell basically, with packages splattered across free hosting services and all these strange places, no central organized way. Then, you have to be using the exact version package or forget it and its a mess even finding the right files.

Its kind of a mess and I'm done playing with even trying to install apps, I gave up and went running back to my lovely vector box where everything works beautifully, but not quite as fast or responsive as puppy.

I was trying puppy on an ancient computer that did not work so well with vector, but I think I will try again with light.

I just figured perhaps I could learn something from that awful experience that could benefit my main vectorbox

Steven

It's not quite that bad IMO, but I agree it's a problem. What I basically do is install only the apps I know are going to work on my system (and I've had 3 years experience in knowing) and there's still plenty of those for mainstream requirements such as browsing the Web, preparing documents and playing music and video files etc. In particular, Vector IMO could do with a nice, compact personal database like Puppy's PortaBase which both imports and exports comma-delimited text files and which I use a lot for both addresses/'phone numbers and a local history project I've been working on on and off over the years.

In general, Puppy is more of an amateur enterprise than Vector. There are several different ideas about what it should be, feeding into it at once and it gets pulled in different directions. For example, there's a project under way at the moment called Dpup which will hopefully have a Debian base and be able to install Ubuntu apps, and there's been one investigating the possibility of an Arch Linux-based Puppy (though I believe that one was abandoned).

One good thing about Puppy is that like Vector it still actively supports dialup, one of the few Linux distros which still does. If you can't get online with pppsetup for example, and I can't, forget about using Zenwalk if you still use an external dialup modem (a shame because Zenwalk's got a lot going for it in other ways).

It all comes down to horses for courses in the end. BTW, I suspect the reason the files are spread over several different hosting services is because there aren't any funds to pay for a big central server and they have to rely on whoever has the space and generosity to host the files themselves (and there are a few who have done this, notably in Asia and Canada).